Saturday, November the 8th 2008
Kunstencentrum Netwerk, Aalst, Belgium
Live:
PIERRE BASTIEN on Mecanium
TOYTONE & MARC NOSTROMO on Gp2x Handheld
SUN OK PAPI K.O. on bicycle horns
JOZEF VAN WISSEM on lute
We live in the age of the total availability of music. Music history, music theory and even archives of music itself - the internet grants access to everything at any time. This fires people's imaginations, but it also makes one feel dizzy. The possibilities of choosing and combining musical archive material are boundless - and the examples of its reinterpretation and reframing by contemporary musicians also seem to be without limit. Today, music is perceived of as a matter, which can be combined and modified as one chooses. In this context, artistic freedom has come to resemble the freedom of the customer in a gigantic supermarket. His choice is devaluated; it becomes almost arbitrary through the oversupply of goods.
ONE is a concept of artistic limitation. Therefore it is a counterpart to the new arbitrariness. With their festival, the curators create fixed structures for artistic concepts. The dogma functions as a source of friction and an anchor at the same time.
"Necessity is the mother of invention", says the proverb. If your resources are limited, you're forced to make the best of it by being inventive. The idea behind the first Dogma festival is easily explained: ONE imposes a restriction. Do what you want, but do it on only one instrument as your source of sound. What happens within those boundaries is up to the resourcefulness of the curators and the musicians. Large ensembles, orchestras or soloists - everything is allowed. Also, the sounds can be modified in any imaginable way. The only condition is that only one instrument should audible at a time. Due to this imposed restriction, works are being created, which would not have been conceived in total artistic freedom. Originality emerges through the working within a limited sphere, through the developments that come from this basic restriction. To ask musicians to restrict themselves to one instrument can lead to an intensive examination and rethinking of the possibilities of an instrument. And it encourages and inspires the "misuse" (i.e. other that its intended uses -whatever they might be) of an instrument and thereby breaking up the "rules" of its customary use. ONE encourages the manipulation of "ordinary" instruments and even the creation of new ones.
Pierre Bastien is a musical inventor who, through his delicately anachronistic creations, opens nostalgic spaces for reflection. Mecanium, Bastien's orchestra, is an assembly of individual, home-made robots designed to play music mechanically. Constructed from meccano and recycled turntable motors, and numbering more than 80 at last count, the oldest dates back to 1977. The robots are set loose on arcane instruments to hit, pluck and bow via an intricate network of gears and pulleys, producing hypnotic loops. For ONE Bastien will play a small device (65cm x 45cm) that includes drums and reeds and strings, all played mechanically. He will face the challenge to play only the machine without using anything else like trumpet or sanzas or violins as he normally does.
www.pierrebastien.com
TOYTONE aka Patric Catani has been messing up the musical landscape from Tokyo to Sao Paolo for some time now. Some of his multiple other monikers and working places are A*Class, EC8OR, Candie Hank, Very Impossible Person or Puppetmastaz. Even though Patrics first experience in business with his teen project, E De Cologne, is kind of a painful memory in his (tender) heart, he nevertheless managed to throw in his extreme and absurd music smoothly and funkily, again and again, as if he were throwing a bottle of good wine into a ballroom. Especially for his stage appearances using the GP2x handheld Patric invented his alter ego "Toytone".
MARC NOSTROMO, programmer and musician from Brussels, well known in Gameboy and Sidtune circles, invented the software LittleGPTracker (aka 'The piggy') as a music tracker optimised to run on portable game consoles. It is currently running on Game Park's GP2x but there's a version for windows & mac too. Toytone and Nostromo will share the stage for this very special game convention.
www.myspace.com/pcatani
www.myspace.com/discodirt
www.www.littlegptracker.com
Laurent Baudoux aka SUN OK PAPI K.O. creates his music as a genius dilettante, a professed non-virtuoso. His recent album on sonig Orchestre Philharmonok is full to the brim with serious euphoria about club tracks without club and avant-garde without music theory. This doesn't mean certain pop styles are ridiculed or quoted, no, it is authentic fan admiration that gives this music its astonishing appeal. With the determination of a sleepwalker SUN OK PAPI K.O. twists dry grooves, pointed sub bass notes and catchy melodies managing with just three or four notes to take the listener's breath away. Laurent has just been touring with his project Baleine 3000 feat. the ingenious MC Illreme. For ONE Laurent will play bicycle horns using mysterious technical devices that even he does'nt know by now.
www.sonig.com
Jozef van Wissem probably plays and composes for the most unlikely instruments in the world of contemporary improvised music: the Renaissance and Baroque lute. He has accomplished the strange feat of bridging the idiom of seventeenth century lute literature and twenty-first century free improv of the silent type. Although Van Wissem uses subtle electronic sound manipulation, he has largely stayed faithful to the particular timbre, resonance and playing technique of the lute. Van Wissem first came to be noticed a few years ago because of his radical conceptual approach to Renaissance lute music: he deconstructed existing compositions, for instance by playing them backwards. He also composed his own pieces for lute, using palindromes and mirrored structures. His music therefore does not have a traditional linear progression, nor leads to a climax, it rather stays on the same level of intensity.
www.jozefvanwissem.com